Contact Center Operations: Key Roles & Functions Explained

Understanding the ins, outs, and major differences in contact center operations means your hierarchy is set up to optimize each element of your customer-facing unit.

Failing to get this right means you’ve got the wrong personnel in specialist roles. The right people in the right areas means you’re already halfway there toward achieving high customer satisfaction and ensuring a high retention rate.

Contact center ops is much more than handling inbound calls. Organizations now oversee channels like email, live chat, social media, chatbots, and other messaging channels through apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

A well-structured contact center must optimize its operations across these channels and platforms, ensuring a smooth and effective customer experience.

Key Responsibilities in Contact Center Operations

1. Contact center managers

A contact center manager oversees the entire contact center operation and work environment, including performance across all channels. The manager ensures optimal service levels, agent availability, and budgets.

While this role isn’t hands-on (e.g., handling customers or running training programs), the contact center manager is responsible for building the right team to achieve high-level results in each aspect.

The main difference between managing a call center versus a contact center is the variety of customer channels supported.

A typical call center manager concerns themselves with service levels and key performance indicators like response times and customer satisfaction for inbound voice calls. In a multichannel or omnichannel contact center, a manager must have experience dealing with customers and teams who support the entire customer journey (email, chat, social media, etc.).

Common contact center management tasks include:

• Leading team-building efforts
• Managing budgets
• Aligning contact center goals with business objectives

Primary objective: Ensure the team is adequately staffed and supported and meets targets for the entire contact center across all channels.

Suggested metrics: channel mix, service level, and average handle time (AHT)

2. Team leaders/supervisors

Contact center supervisors (or team leaders) report to a contact center manager and supervise a group of agents handling multiple communication channels.

As a more ground-level role, supervisors provide onboarding, real-time coaching, and agent performance monitoring and ensure adherence to contact center protocols.

When customers request escalation (or if a supervisor proactively decides to step in), it’s not uncommon for supervisors to take over a call, web chat, or whichever channel is in question.

Supervisors spend significant time implementing process improvements, managing schedules, and handling escalations in addition to providing reactive support.

Primary objective: Manage a team of contact center agents across multiple channels, ensuring customer expectations and needs are met.

Suggested metrics: agent availability rate, first call resolution, and customer satisfaction (CSAT)

3. Multichannel customer service representatives (CSRs)

CSRs, otherwise known as agents, are the frontline of your business and handle customer inquiries across platforms like phone, email, chat, and social media. Over the course of a normal day, CSRs are expected to resolve customer issues, provide product or service information, and route complex issues to specialized teams.

Some agents may collaborate with specialized teams to make proactive outbound calls, aiming to ensure customer satisfaction and prevent issues before they arise.

Unlike starting a call center, you must also factor in written communications for different interactions aside from voice. For example, responding to social media messages requires a different skill set from that of an entry-level call center agent.

In addition to handling customer interactions, responsibilities include using customer relationship management (CRM) systems and knowledge bases to ensure consistent responses and maintain high service quality across channels.

Primary objective: Handle inbound queries from customers via phone calls, emails, social media, web chat, and SMS.

Suggested metrics: average speed of answer, call volume, and AHT

4. Workforce management (WFM) team

A WFM manager or WFM team is tasked with creating and managing staff schedules to ensure adequate coverage based on call volume forecasts. Whereas call center workforce management only concerns itself with having enough agents to handle incoming calls, the WFM management role ensures that many different channels are sufficiently staffed.

The main responsibility of a WFM manager is to develop forecasting models to predict peak call times and staffing needs. However, when the situation demands, they must also start call monitoring in real time and adjust staffing as needed.

Whether you refer to this as workforce engagement or workforce management, the WFM manager oversees agent availability and ensures the contact center is staffed appropriately during peak and off-peak times.

Expect a WFM manager to lean on call center analytics like agent availability, adherence to schedules, and shrinkage. These all feed into the next versions of staff rotas and various models that are ready for future implementation.

Primary objective: Ensure sufficient staffing levels based on historical trends, changing scenarios, and channel demand.

Suggested metrics: channel mix, call center shrinkage, and agent availability rate

5. Quality assurance (QA) team

A QA manager or team of QA managers monitors and evaluates agent interactions across voice, email, chat, and social channels to ensure adherence to protocols and quality standards.

Whereas call center quality assurance only focuses on script adherence and quality standards during calls, multichannel QA managers are responsible for ensuring uniform language and ethics are applied across every channel offered.

Once calls, transcripts, and interactions have been checked and scored, QAs provide feedback to agents and supervisors for continuous improvement. Armed with this information, senior QAs may develop and update quality frameworks based on customer feedback and evolving business needs.

🚀🚀 Suggestion: Use sentiment analysis and voice analytics to automatically flag the calls that need attention.

Primary objective: Ensure agents provide the expected service levels and adhere to scripts and brand guidelines across all channels.

Suggested metrics: customer sentiment, Net Promoter Score, and CSAT

6. IT & systems support

While not working directly in a contact center, an IT admin plays a vital role by overseeing the contact center’s technical infrastructure.

This includes telephony functionality like:

• Interactive voice response (IVR) systems
• Auto attendants
• Call routing
• Call queueing
• Self-service options (FAQs and routine inquiries)
• CRM software
• Call recording tools

Without any of these key systems, the contact center can have multiple touchpoints that negatively impact agent performance. Hence, managing system upgrades, troubleshooting technical issues, and ensuring system uptime should not be ignored when planning contact center operations.

This technical resource will work closely with service providers and vendors to maintain the contact center’s communication systems. Expect there to be regular conversations between supervisors, managers, and IT team members to ensure an always-optimal technical setup for your agents.

If you’re introducing artificial intelligence and automation into your contact center, consult with your IT and systems teams to ensure continued protection of customer data and adherence to any other potential security policies.

You’ll also need to engage IT support to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS, especially when there’s any change in contact center technology.

Primary objective: Look after key telecoms and contact center systems infrastructure to ensure your call center staff can work optimally.

Suggested metrics: service level, call abandonment rate, and average wait times

7. Social media & community manager

In some contact centers, you may opt to segment call center agents and social media managers to handle their own types of inquiries.

Especially in the case of high-volume social media interactions, a dedicated social and community manager will monitor social media channels for customer inquiries, complaints, or opportunities for engagement. These may not be direct and therefore may involve an element of brand listening and keyword tracking.

Primary objective: Maintain the brand’s voice, highlight customer loyalty, and ensure a positive image is upheld through responsive, courteous engagement.

Suggested metrics: audience growth rate, CSAT, and share of voice

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8. Data analysts

In large teams or those with high call or contact volumes, it’s not uncommon to have a dedicated data analyst to collect and analyze call data and contact center reports.

These will differ from business to business but often include:

• Number of calls
• Channel mix
• Average handle time
• First contact resolution rate
• CSAT scores

With access to this data, an analyst generates reports that provide insights into contact center performance and identify areas for improvement.

This information then supports decision-making, like staffing adjustments, script revisions, or workflow improvements. In a way, this role is like that of a QA analyst. The main difference is that a data analyst only examines data, charts, and analytics — rather than customer feedback.

In smaller businesses, it’s not uncommon for a QA analyst and data analyst role to overlap.

Primary objective: Analyze contact center data to leverage insights that drive positive business decisions and impact your bottom line.

Suggested metrics: AHT, channel mix, and CSAT

Equip Your Contact Center Team With the Best Tools

Balancing a mixture of callers and channels needs a thorough understanding of contact center operations. It’s no longer acceptable to force square pegs into round holes and hope all works out well.

Instead, taking a holistic view and understanding who may thrive in each position and why each is of unique importance is a clear step toward contact center and business success.

When you’ve got the right people in the right places, you need to equip them with a unified contact center platform that enables their best work.

Platforms like Nextiva enable new channels and heaps of modern features and provide ease of use and depth of integrations to empower each member to do their best work.

If you want to improve the output of your contact center operations, consider Nextiva as your hub for customer support.